On being (a wallflower)

Life is so much what we make of it, it’s a hard lesson to learn in life, but I know that it’s critical to living a full life. A personal example: I spent last week freaking out, I called my parents daily (always a bad sign for my mental health) I complained about everything, I could find no good in anything I did. This week I’ve been focusing on the positives and it’s amazing how I’ve found so many positives in the same things I was complaining about last week and all I had to do was refocus my mind.

Has anything changed in the last week? Not on the outside, no. But my view of it has been transformed. At the beginning of the week I picked up “the perks of being a wallflower” and I couldn’t help thinking that this book would have resonated with me more ten years ago. I mean ten years ago I was a wallflower. Now? Not nearly as much, though I don’t believe our fundamental natures change. I am still the same quiet, reflective kid I was ten years ago, and ten years before that. Yet much like the main character in the book, I at some point decided that I could choose to participate, I could choose to feel a part of what was going on. It didn’t happen overnight but gradually, slowly I looked back and thought to myself, what happened to that kid who used to play by himself at recess?

There were many factors that contributed to it, but in the end it was my decision to make the effort, even in the face of great adversity that idea won the day. Glory, glory Hallelujah!

In that sense we’re all the same, as much as we’d like to fool ourselves otherwise. Our main character Charlie ultimately realizes this. In the end he rejects isolation and embraces inclusion. What happens to him we’ll never know, it’s a brilliant twist. Once he rejects isolation we lose our connection to the story. I related to the book on a personal level, I hope that most if not all people do. It’s not hard to me to draw parallels to his life and mine; it starts with him attempting to end his isolation by writing to an unknown correspondent… and what else is a blog, especially this one but an attempt to share in my own feelings of alienation and isolation I actually wrote about this idea not long ago when I changed the name of the blog. I said the following:

“…it (this blog) was a way of reaching out from a foreign land. I knew that when I made the decision to go to Israel I was going to come home profoundly changed.”

It’s amazing how not just living this transformation but writing about it has profoundly changed the way I see it. It was in many ways the last step for me in accepting a part of myself that I was struggling with. When I first started leaning Torah I felt isolated. I was rejecting the values and assumptions of my peers and family in many visible ways. I needed to reach out and I found I could in a semi anonymous way (is it really anonymous if you use your real name to post, and talk about nothing but your life?) I’ve found that putting ideas down in a public forum has helped me see them in a new light.

Charlie sees it the same way. He remarks to his unknown correspondent that it wouldn’t be the same if he were writing a journal, he needs what he is thinking to be seen and read and thought about by others. He’s reaching out in the only was he feels he can.

I know that’s why this book resonated with me and so many others, it’s not enough to live in isolation, it’s not enough to just like ourselves. We need approval; we need to come to grips with who we are collectively, as part of a group. We all deal with trauma; none of it can be trivialized. As I told my mom last week “I know that ultimately I have it good, I know that there are people dealing with ‘bigger’ issues then myself, but in the end I have to deal with my issues. God judges us all on our own merits, which means that our problems are not insignificant, they are real, we cannot trivialize them, we cannot comfort ourselves by thinking others have it worse. It does us no good. So I’m dealing with my issues.”

“the perks of being a wallflower” is a story of empowerment, of the great power we all have to take control of our lives. We must accept the things that have happened to us, we must try to understand that much is out of our control but what we do have the power to control is the way we react to those circumstances.

I’ll leave with words of wisdom from Charlie:

“There is the story of the two brothers whose father was a bad alcoholic. One brother grew up to be a successful carpenter who never drank. The other brother ended up being a drinker as bad as his dad was. When they asked the first brother why he didn’t drink, he said that after he saw what it did to his father, he could never bring himself to even try it. When they asked the other brother he said, that he guessed he had learned to drink on his father’s knee. So I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we’ll never know most of them. But even if we don’t have to power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there. We can still do things. And we can try to feel okay about them.”